Monitor sites and site collections in SharePoint 2013

Summary: Learn how to monitor SharePoint 2013 sites and site collections to maintain sites that run as expected.

Several configurable tools help you monitor sites and site collections. You can run the site collection health checks to check the health status of a site collection. You can use the Web Application Availability Monitoring Template and the Web Application Transaction Monitoring Template to monitor site availability and site transaction. You can check Internet Information Services (IIS) logs for troubleshooting.

You can use a specific tool to monitor sites and site collections in various scenarios:

SharePoint Health Analyzer rules

SharePoint 2013 provides built-in SharePoint Health Analyzer rules for you to monitor sites and site collections. You can monitor performance and configuration of web applications.

Site collection health checks

Use the health checks to check site collections manually to prepare for an upgrade, or run them at any time to verify that a site is working as expected.

Web Application Availability Monitoring

Use the Web Application Availability Monitoring template that System Center 2012 - Operations Manager provides to monitor web-based applications from different locations. The results can determine whether sites are working according to certain requirements, which you can specify.

Web Application Transition Monitoring

Use the Web Application Transition Monitoring template that System Center 2012 - Operations Manager provides to monitor the availability and performance of any website or web-based application to test both general availability and functionality. For internal websites, you can use watcher nodes in different network segments to make sure that the site is available to each segment.

In addition to general availability, you can check the functionality of the website by testing different pages and features. For example, you could check a logon process by performing a test logon with a test user account every few minutes. You could test the functionality of a search page by performing a sample search after the test user account is logged on. You can then analyze the HTML that is returned from these pages to verify that the page functioned as expected. In addition to testing this functionality, you can analyze the time that is required to fill the request to measure the performance.

IIS logs

When you want to know who changed settings of a website, and the changes that occurred, you can use IIS logs.

Operations Manager provides a tool that is called the Web Application Availability Monitoring template. You can use this template to create availability monitoring tests for the dedicated IP addresses of the farm and run these monitoring tests from internal locations. In addition to state and alert views, you can display the status of these tests in a provided map dashboard and a details dashboard. Use the Web Application Availability Monitoring template to monitor web-based applications from different locations to see whether they are working according to certain requirements. For more information, see Web Application Availability Monitoring Template.

Operations Manager provides a tool that is called the Web Application Transaction Monitoring template. You can use this template to test a website or web-based application by sending requests over HTTP, validating their responses, and measuring their performance. This can be a simple test to determine whether the website is responding, or it can be a complex set of requests to simulate a user who is performing such actions as logging on to the site and browsing pages. You can use the Web Application Transition Monitoring template to monitor the availability and performance of any website. You can also configure the Web Application Transition Monitoring template to meet your specific monitoring needs. For more information, see Web Application Transaction Monitoring Template.